Canan Dagdeviren

Canan Dagdeviren is a Turkish materials scientist and physicist whose work has helped redefine what electronic devices can become when they are designed to bend, stretch, and live in harmony with the soft, curved surfaces of the human body. As a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she leads the Conformable Decoders research group at the MIT Media Lab, she has devoted her career to a deceptively simple but radical idea: that the rigid, flat silicon chips which power the modern world are fundamentally mismatched to biology, and that a new generation of soft, conformable electronics can read the hidden signals of the body and translate them into knowledge that saves lives.

She was born in 1985 in Istanbul, Turkey, and grew up in a family that valued learning and questioning. From an early age she was fascinated by the invisible forces that govern matter — the way materials respond to pressure, heat, and electricity. Her curiosity was not abstract; it was rooted in a desire to understand the world well enough to change it. This combination of wonder and purpose would become the signature of her scientific life. She has often spoken of the influence of her grandmother and the women of her family, and of an early determination to use science as a tool for human dignity and care.

Dagdeviren pursued her education with remarkable focus and breadth. She earned a bachelor's degree in physics engineering at Hacettepe University in Ankara and a master's degree in materials science and engineering at Sabanci University in Istanbul, building a foundation that bridged the abstract laws of physics with the practical craft of engineering real materials. She then traveled to the United States to undertake doctoral research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, working with the renowned materials scientist John A. Rogers, a leading figure in the field of flexible and stretchable electronics. There she immersed herself in the science of piezoelectric materials — substances that generate electricity when they are mechanically deformed — and the engineering of devices thin enough to wrap around a beating heart.

One of the achievements that brought her early recognition was the development of a flexible piezoelectric device designed to harvest energy from the natural motion of internal organs. The concept was striking in its elegance: the heart, lungs, and diaphragm move ceaselessly throughout a lifetime, and that mechanical motion is normally wasted. Dagdeviren and her colleagues demonstrated a soft, biocompatible device that could be mounted on the surface of organs and convert their movement into electrical power — power that could one day run a pacemaker without a battery that must be surgically replaced. This work pointed toward a future in which implanted medical electronics draw their energy from the body itself, quietly and indefinitely.

Her doctoral and postdoctoral research also produced conformable sensors capable of measuring the mechanical properties of human skin and tissue with great sensitivity. These thin, skin-like devices could detect subtle changes in elasticity and hydration, opening possibilities for monitoring skin health, detecting abnormalities, and tracking how tissues change with age or disease. After completing her doctorate, she continued her training as a junior fellow at Harvard University's Society of Fellows, one of the most selective scholarly honors in the world, before joining the faculty at MIT.

At MIT, Dagdeviren founded the Conformable Decoders group with a guiding philosophy that gives the lab its name: that nature encodes vital information in patterns — pressure, vibration, motion, electrical and chemical signals — and that the role of her devices is to conform to the body and decode those patterns into something humans can read and act upon. Under this banner her team has pursued a series of projects united by a single thread: making electronics that meet the body on its own terms rather than forcing the body to accommodate hard, foreign machines.

Among the most widely noted of these projects is a wearable ultrasound patch intended to make breast cancer screening more continuous and accessible. Motivated in part by the loss of a beloved aunt to breast cancer, Dagdeviren set out to design a soft, flexible scanner that a person could potentially use to monitor breast tissue between traditional clinical screenings, with the hope of catching tumors earlier when treatment is most effective. The project embodies her conviction that technology should bring sophisticated diagnostics out of the hospital and into everyday life, and that grief can be transformed into invention that spares others the same loss.

Her laboratory has also developed conformable devices aimed at the brain and nervous system, including flexible probes and ingestible or implantable systems designed to deliver drugs or sense signals in places where rigid electronics simply cannot go. The common goal is to build instruments that are gentle, intimate, and intelligent — that can sit against living tissue for long periods without harm and report faithfully on what is happening inside.

Dagdeviren's contributions have been recognized by some of the most prestigious honors available to a young scientist. She was named to the MIT Technology Review list of Innovators Under 35, recognized among Forbes' notable young innovators, and elected as a member of distinguished scholarly societies. Yet she has consistently framed accolades as a means rather than an end, returning again and again to the patients and ordinary people whose lives her devices are meant to improve.

Beyond the laboratory, she has become a visible advocate for the inclusion of women and underrepresented groups in science and engineering, and a mentor to students from around the world. Having crossed cultures and continents in her own journey from Istanbul to Cambridge, Massachusetts, she speaks openly about identity, belonging, and the responsibility of scientists to serve humanity broadly. She has argued that the most important questions in engineering are ultimately human questions — about suffering, care, and the desire to live well — and that the best technologies are those designed with empathy at their core.

Dagdeviren's work sits at the meeting point of several great currents of modern science: materials physics, microfabrication, biomedical engineering, and human-centered design. What distinguishes her approach is not only technical ingenuity but a moral clarity about the purpose of that ingenuity. She begins not with a device looking for a use, but with a human need looking for a solution, and then bends the laws of materials science to meet it.

For a young person dreaming of a life in science, her story carries a luminous lesson. It shows that the frontiers of technology are not reserved for those who abandon their roots or their feelings, but are often pushed forward precisely by people who carry their personal histories, their losses, and their love for others into the laboratory. It shows that curiosity, when joined to compassion and discipline, can produce inventions that ease real human suffering. And it affirms a truth at the heart of the Islamic tradition of learning: that knowledge is a trust, and that the pursuit of understanding finds its fullest meaning when it is turned toward the service and dignity of human life.

As her career continues to unfold, Canan Dagdeviren stands as a living example of the modern scientist who refuses the false choice between rigorous excellence and human warmth. Her flexible, conformable devices may one day be found inside hearts and against skins around the world, quietly listening, decoding, and healing — a testament to the idea that the most advanced science can also be the most tender.